Mike Was Right

Donald Trump won thanks to history’s biggest “fuck you” vote

World | by Gwynne Dyer

Not many things are certain in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s narrow victory in the U.S. presidential election, but FBI Director James Comey can rest assured that his job is safe. His prediction of a new investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails 11 days before the election (followed by a retraction only 36 hours before the vote) gave Trump the edge he needed to win in the close-run contests in the “battleground states”.

Another sure bet is that Trump will not waste his time trying to send Hillary Clinton to jail, despite his many promises to “lock her up”. But this brings us rapidly to the nub of the matter: how many of his promises does he really intend to keep? If he keeps them all, we are in for a wild ride in the next four years.

President Barack Obama, addressing his last rally before the election, said: “All that progress (we made) goes down the drain if we don’t win tomorrow.” So down it goes: the promising climate change deal signed in Paris last December, the Affordable Care Act that gave 20 million poorer Americans access to health insurance, the deal that persuaded Iran to stop working on nuclear weapons, and maybe the whole 68-year-old NATO alliance.

Trump is often accused of being sketchy on the details of his plans, but he has actually given us quite a lot of details on these issues. He’s not just going to tear up the Paris climate accord, for example. At home, he’s going to dismantle all but a few “little tidbits” of the Environmental Protection Agency and, he says, revive the coal industry.

He’s not just going to restart a confrontation with Iran. He has talked about closer cooperation with Russia in the fight against Islamic State — which, given Russia’s support for the Assad regime, might even give Assad a decisive victory in the Syrian civil war.

Will he really deport 11 million illegal immigrants from the United States? (He backtracked a bit on that.) Will he build a wall on the Mexican border? (He can’t walk away from that promise.) Will he ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.? (Not in so many words, maybe, but Muslims should not consider taking vacations there.)

Will Trump tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, and repudiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a free trade deal linking most Pacific Rim countries except China) and the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (a similar deal between the U.S. and the European Union)? Yes, yes and yes. Destroying the current “globalized” trading arrangements was a key part of his platform.

Will he impose import duties on goods made in America’s trading partners in an attempt to “bring the jobs home”, including 35 per cent tariffs on Mexican-made goods and 45 per cent on Chinese exports? If he does, he’ll be starting a global trade war, and in the case of China, a confrontation that could even turn military.

How could almost half of American voters support all this (47.5 per cent)? Well, they didn’t, actually. They weren’t interested in the details.

They just hated the way the country was changing. Many of them had lost out economically because of the changes, and they were all very angry. As American film-maker and social commentator Michael Moore predicted, Donald Trump has ridden to power on the back of the biggest “Fuck You” vote in history.

It was driven by the same rage that fuelled the Brexit vote in Britain last June, and it was equally heedless of consequences. Pro-Brexit British voters were more obsessed by immigration and Trump voters were more upset about jobs going abroad, but white working-class males provided the core support in both cases and the basic message was the same: “Stop the world. I want to get off.”

Populists like Boris Johnson in England and Donald Trump in the United States are just exploiting those emotions, but they are barking up the wrong tree. The basic change that is leaving so many people feeling marginalised and unhappy is not immigration or globalization. Those scapegoats are popular mainly because you can imagine doing something to solve the problem: close the doors to immigrants, rip up the free trade deals.

But the real change is automation: computers and robots are eating up most of the jobs. Seven million American factory jobs have disappeared since 1979, but American factory production has doubled in the same time. The United States is still the world’s second largest manufacturer, behind only China.

So the populists can go on baying at the moon for a while, but sooner or later we will have to recognize that this is unstoppable change and start figuring out how to live with it. In particular, we will have to figure out how a large proportion of the people in developed countries can still have self-respect and a decent living standard when there are no jobs for them.